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Kissinger’s Year: 1973 by Alistair Horne

It is interesting to recall, as Alistair Horne notes at the beginning of this pacey portrait of the most eventful year since the end of the second world war, that, over Christmas 1972 Henry Kissinger assumed he would be sacked as national security adviser. Fearing the worst and wearying of the mood swings and tawdry anti-semitism of President Nixon, Kissinger had his eye not on Harvard, where he had made his name in the 1960s, but on Oxford, where he sought an All Souls fellowship.

The US-UK "special relationship" has since become so asymmetrical that it is no longer possible to imagine a superstar of the American foreign policy firmament parking himself on the banks of the Cherwell. Our side of this special relationship now seems to be reduced to providing presidential historians - Niall ­Ferguson, Andrew Roberts, Paul Johnson and John Keegan are all British authors who, like Horne, are